Safe Speed Forums

Here you go, this looks like it shows the effect of cameras (or not) for serious casualties:



Looks like a link to me.

Really??? I don't call 10 deaths a day on our UK roads 'exceptional'. Too many, drastic, maybe!!!!

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belladonna
'Wisdom is knowing how little we know'
Socrates

Looks like a link to what?

Something looks to have happened to downturn serious casualties towards the end of the 1990s, years before the line which denotes when speed cameras were introduced.

Anyway, if you were trying to propose a link between speed cameras and accident rates, then you would need to carry out a scientific experiment with proper control sites. I've not yet seen any study which has done this properly yet. Oh, and it's important that it's not just accident blackspots that would need to be chosen as sites.

Another important thing to remember is that correllation does not imply causality.

Fine, but what area does it refer to and what is the scale?

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I stole this .sig

Well, you have to compare it with the number of vehicle movements or incidents. Yes, 10 deaths a day is a lot, but amongst 32 million licenced drivers each death is rare and exceptional. in rough daily figures we have:

10 deaths
100 serious injuries
1000 slight injuries
10,000 damage onlys
100,000 incidents.

Only 1 in 10,000 incidents ends in a death. phone ... more later.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

Yes, point taken.........good statistics above........will have to use them on my boards!!!
But, for us having to deal with these 10 deaths and 100 serious injuries, multiplied into;
1 death = 1 spouse/parent = sibling, grandparent, work partner, etc, etc,
all in grief/shock, then these statistics become real.
But yes, looking at it from the 'outside', can see all the points.

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belladonna
'Wisdom is knowing how little we know'
Socrates

Govt. statistics say that there are approximately 1.36 billion vehicle km per day on Great Britain's roads, 86% of these in England, meaning that there are an awful lot of vehicle movements in GB which don't involve an incident, let alone a fatal accident.

Why the switch from K&SI or K to SI only?

OK, you are showing an improvement in SI. Thats great, just what we want to see. So that is all due to cameras then?

Factors such as improved car safety features including: wider adoption of ABS, ESP, Airbags, Load Limited Seat Belts, and generally much stronger chassis design with crumple zones have have had no impact at all over that period?

If cameras were the sole factor in this improvement, then I would expect to see that the average speeds had come down at the same rate as the reduced SI rate. Have they? Only at Camera sites, but in general no, unless you have information for non-camera sites that we haven't seen.

However if much of the SI improvement is down to car design changes, then I would expect to see that we have a much higher proportion of vehicles on the road with higher NCAP ratings. Ah there might be something in this one, because NCAP ratings are continuously and dramatically improving, and they only address occupant and pedestrian safety, and ignore features such as ESP and ABS that allow the impact to be avoided in the first place (big supporters of ESP though).

Now when was NCAP started, and all manufacturers suddenly have to concentrate on producing safer vehicles? 1997.

I have very strong doubts that the recent reductions in the numbers of serious injuries relate to road safety at all. See:

http://www.safespeed.org.uk/serious.html

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

While not wishing to detract from anything you say (I lost two close family members to road accidents), around 3000 people die every day in the UK from all causes, and a fair percentage of those are preventable and/or premature.

[Edited to add:]
But the real point is, until we start addressing the real causes of these deaths, instead of listening to the snake-oil salesmen, people are going to continue to die at much the same rate.
That's why I feel Paul was perfectly justified in his statement, given the context in which he made it.

Cheers
Peter

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Only when ideology, prejudice and dogma are set aside does the truth emerge - Kepler

That would be how to peruse a forum or two, and catch some moron stupid enough to incriminate himself for falsifying his S172?
Of course if the offender had been stopped at the scene of the "crime" the second offence would not have arisen, and nobody would have spent hours chasing up the offender instead of doing something useful!
It only goes to show that there is NOTHING safe about a camera, and that had the offender not been so silly as to brag online, HE WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN CAUGHT!!
And to think Steve is so proud of himself!!!
It's the type of intelligence which leads you to insert your put down in the middle of the quotation so people of below average IQ's dont notice it!!

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Time to take responsibility for our actions.. and don't be afraid of speaking out!

The graph is for the whole of Cumbria. It is the whole road network.

We have done a comparison between the following:
1. Core Safety Camera locations
2. Control locations (similar size and accident history but just failed acceptance)
3. Whole of Cumbria network

Reductions in accidents year on year for 1, 2, 3 are:
1. -70%
2. -12%
3. -12%

Perhaps you could outline the specifications of an investigation you would qualify as "proper", the results when shown late last year/early this year were disbelieved.

What I am indicating is that the downturn in the negative gradient coincides with the Safety Camera introduction. The best arguments we have had to challenge any links are similar to your "something has happened" and someone elses "something funny is happening", now I don't really regard these as intelligent or meaningful challenges to these figures. My view is strengthened in rejecting these pathetic responses by the crazy publicity given to the link between camera enforcement and an increase in road deaths. Hopefully you can all appreciate the futility of the death claim but you just cannot give any worthwhile or valid reason for this other than "something funny", "something has happened" or "the recording system is being fiddled". So send this in with your crazy claims to the newspapers and see what they think of it all.

I have been resisting this for a long time but you have it coming: BOLLOCKS!

Nice trick that, suppressing the zero to make the graph look far more dramatic than it really is. But I digress.

Have you ever asked yourself why it is that fatalities have increased while serious injuties have (apparently) gone down?
It's safe to assume that both deaths and serious injuries tend to result from serious accidents (rather than minor ones) and, as serious injuries outnumber fatalities by a factor of around 10, it's not unreasonable to assume that the number of serious accidents has gone down. But it's then also reasonable to assume that the serious accidents which do occur have gotten more serious (resulting in a greater proportion of deaths)

Why is this?

Or has the number of serious injuries come down due to other factors, external to the accidents?
Could it be that the stats don't give the true picture?

The following is an extract from RAGB



So, officially, serious injuries can be under-reported by anything up to 2.76 times.

How, then, can you be so sure that your drop in serious injuries is real?

Cheers
Peter

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Only when ideology, prejudice and dogma are set aside does the truth emerge - Kepler

I agree that injuries and accidents could be under reported but the level of under reporting would have to increase year on year to produce this effect if the serious injuries were at or about the same level. I do not believe that is the case, the reporting mechanism is essentially the same for the whole period with the causation and contributory factors recording changing in Jan 2005 or earlier, perhaps late 2004. The factors do not have an effect on the volume of serious casualties.
So again, you have not forwarded a real reason that detracts from the coincidence of safety camera operations and serious casualty rate falling at a faster rate.
As for the graphical trick, I have no qualms with putting in a graph with an origin at 0 but then you would not see the difference in the negative gradients. I you want I will do so and give you a table with the regression formula of the 3 lines. It makes no odds to me and you must realise that the scale affords no advantage to my point as did the selective choice of fatall casualty stats in whomsoever presented the letter to the News and Star. That was and remains a very cheap trick that weakens the case of the SS objective. I note an earlier denial of responsibility that did not come untill this was pointed out.
I offer the coincidence as a real consideration as I have done last year and still no valid challenge has come from the anti-camera groups that satisfy a discounting of that coincidence of events. That is why we believe the coincidence is significant. Oh by the way, so do 4 of our colleagues with 10's of thousands of hours research and practical work between them.

OK, so let's say - for the purpose of the argument - that that's only a small effect, so it's back to my first argument.
How is it that seious injuries have gone down but fatalities have increased?
Has there been a change in the number of serious accidents and, if so, which way? If serious accidents have increased in number, then it could be down to factors such as safer cars, improved trauma care, under-reporting etc.
If they've decreased in number, then it could be that they're getting more serious.
Either way, it doesn't look like a strong case for speed cameras.

Or is there something else?



You have me at a disadvantage - I do not have the relevant data, but you do (I assume.)

Cheers
Peter

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Only when ideology, prejudice and dogma are set aside does the truth emerge - Kepler

Sounds quite an impressive reduction - is this study published anywhere or on the internet so that I can see it?

I'd be interested to see how many sites (control and camera) were chosen - and also, why did the control sites have "failed acceptance" - there must have been a reason for accepting some sites but rejecting others. This suggests to me that there is something fundamentally different about these sites compared to the camera sites.



Well wait a minute - it looks to me that the deviation occurs in 1998/1999, rather than it coinciding with the camera introduction, which you mark on as being about 1/4 of the way through 2003. Accidents have an intrinsic random nature about them - and the average gradient since 1999 is not that much different to the current gradient - I'd have thought that it'd be difficult to attribute a relatively small reduction in a single complete year's accident figures to cameras, when there is an awful lot of random variation.

The large blip in 2000 is probably partly caused by fewer tourists visiting the Lake District due to the foot & mouth disease epidemic which occured around that time.

This sounds very similar to the statistics pulled in during WW1.

Soldiers were issued with helmets for the first time, and to everyone's surprise, the number of head injuries increased!!

Why? Because people who would have died without one, now just had a head injury.

Quite, except that these figures are going in the opposite direction - like what would have happened if the soldiers had helmets to start with and had them taken away.

Cheers
Peter

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Only when ideology, prejudice and dogma are set aside does the truth emerge - Kepler

Tis true - Steve. Over 'ere - we get 'em on the spot. I am sure we could show you a thing or two about sleuthing as well as we seem to do OK in all areas of policework besides our road safety.

But not a case of "our Ks are lower than yours - nanananananana." Is a case of being in command of the situation at all times . No one will ever reach the magic figure of NIL KSIs as accidents are usually result of bizarre set of circumstances leading by chance to a catastrophe. We try to educate towards observing, anticipating and planning to avoid - COAST principles Our advantage is that we are known and seen out and about. Think the continously decent set of figures speak for themselves in all police work areas in our patch - and all done properly and with a good dollop of tried, tested and true principles.


I rather think our teams get more job satisfaction from a job well done and performed to potential and with results to show than the average desk "joker" in a safety cam offce.

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